Introduction: Marlowe the Play-maker

Abstract

Introduction: Marlowe the Play-maker Pierre Hecker and Roslyn L. Knutson I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, Musicians, that with touching of a string May draw the pliant king which way I please. Music and poetry is his delight; Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night, Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows . . . (Edward II, 1.1.50–55) Christopher Marlowe made his most explicit metatheatrical statement in his last play, and he gave it to a transgressive character. Gaveston knows how to put on a show, and so does the writer who created him. This special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin seeks to foreground the status of Marlowe as a man of the theater. Thomas Beard in 1618 famously referred to Marlowe as “a Poet and a filthy Play-maker,” but the earliest allusions to Marlowe focus very much on the former and rarely on the latter. Two exceptions prove the rule: in A Knight’s Conjuring Thomas Dekker imagines a fraternal gathering of Marlowe, Greene, Peele, and Nashe in an Elysian bower–Marlowe’s playwriting identity deducible from the company he keeps. And Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia in 1598 lists Marlowe as among “our best for Tragedie.” In other references in the same work, however, Meres remembers Marlowe as poet. Marlowe is one by whose writing “the English tongue is mightily enriched, and gorgeouslie inuested in rare ornaments and resplendent abiliments . . . ”; and Meres later refers to Marlowe and George Chapman as “two excellent Poets.” Ben Jonson, in his commendatory poem addressed to Shakespeare in the First Folio, would set the parameters for four centuries of the critical study of Marlowe with three words: “Marlowes mighty line.” Indeed, poetry was inseparable from Marlowe’s writerly identity from the first. In 1593, a little month after Marlowe died, George Peele celebrates him in The Honour of the Garter as “the Muses’ darling for [End Page 1] [his] verse.” Michael Drayton in 1627 writes of Marlowe, poet of “verses cleere,” that he possessed the “fine madnes” of poets, his “raptures” being “All ayre, and fire.” Thus for his contemporaries, Marlowe is a poet, a wordsmith, a crafter of verse; on his craft as an artist of performance, his contemporaries are silent. How Marlowe saw himself is, alas, lost to history. As J.A. Downie puts it bluntly, “We know next to nothing about Christopher Marlowe” (13). With Shakespeare, we know at least that he started in London as a player, the transition to writer and shareholder being logical, sensible, and documented. We have no comparable understanding of why or under what circumstances Marlowe got into the business of playmaking at the end of his career at Cambridge. For evidence of his craft we are left with the plays themselves. There is good scholarship on Marlovian theatre and stage history, but there is much more to be done. Our first contributor, Evelyn Tribble, in “Marlowe’s Boy Actors,” investigates the area of boy players and apprenticeship. Scrutinizing embedded instructions and devices serving to ease memorization and the actor’s alertness to cues on stage, she demonstrates not only Marlowe’s acquaintance with but mastery of the ‘enskillment’ system by which the boys were trained and initiated into the theatre companies. In the next essay, “Marlowe’s Knifework,” Rick Bowers examines the properties of knives and how Marlowe’s kinæsthetic theatricality elicits from the audience real, visceral responses to the unreal stage violence. Marlowe as dramatist is too frequently measured in terms of Shakespeare, yet his influence extended to the repertory of the companies that held his plays well into the seventeenth century. Scholars have recognized the “sons of Tamburlaine” in Marlowe’s immediate wake. Here, Tom Rutter identifies additional descendants by showing how persistently Marlowe’s style and stagecraft were emulated by dramatists who supplied plays to the Admiral’s Men. Lucy Munro, analyzing Marlowe’s influence on the Caroline stage, argues that for these later audiences Marlowe’s plays were, paradoxically, “both comfortingly familiar and appealingly alien,” that is, dated but nonetheless fresh and vital. Currently, Marlowe’s plays are experiencing a revival with some of the mix of archaism and experimentation enjoyed by seventeenth-century audiences. Innovations are...